In refining furnaces such as a converter furnace for producing steel, a steel shell provided inside a furnace body is firstly applied with rectangular permanent bricks, which are a so-called “permanent lining”, on the furnace bottom and the furnace wall. Then, an entire surface of the furnace bottom is paved with rectangular wear bricks by placing the wear bricks over the permanent bricks. After completing the lining of the wear bricks to the furnace bottom, other wear bricks are installed step-by-step along the furnace wall from a lower row of the furnace bottom to an upper row of the furnace wall by placing the wear bricks over the permanent bricks on the same plane. This is a basic process of furnace building.
For improving the efficiency of such a furnace building process, several methods have been proposed (for example, in Patent Document 1 and Patent Document 2).
Patent Document 1 is directed to a brick stacking device by which bricks supplied from a conveyance unit can be moved smoothly and promptly so as to be compacted at a predetermined position.
Patent Document 2 proposes a brick stacking method in which two kinds of bricks with different shapes are substantially circumferentially arranged in several rows in a predetermined order.
That is, in Patent Document 1 and Patent Document 2, each brick having a rectangular cross-sectional shape is compressed to a permanent brick surface for building a furnace.